"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Saturday, January 05, 2013

Adding Value to the Worthless?

Why Embrace 19th Century Assessments for the 21st
Century?

Guest Commentary by Stephen Stollmack

Public education is part of the conceptual framework of this
country. Most accept the basic format of a homeroom teacher keeping the younger
children all or most of the day, phasing into different teachers, each one responsible
for one of the menu of subjects laid out for every child based on his or her
age. Most probably recognize that their
children are facing an environment much different from the one they grew up –
with ‘high-stakes testing, on-line classes, entirely new Standards for
developing classroom modules based on significantadvances in the knowledge-base for most every subject and
increases in class sizes due to budget cuts and the list goes on and on. At the same time, college costs are going
through the roof while we are hearing that approximately 25% of college
graduates can’t find full-time jobs. Even parents who are aware of these
changes are unsure of how education needs to change to ‘keep up with these
times.’

High dropout rates, budget cuts, and pressures being exerted
by the government (to convince parents that the corporate owned or controlled school
model is better) all combine to make taking sides difficult. Further, with their jobs demanding more and
more time and effort, most parents find it hard to keep informed on complex
education issues, such as: implications
for teaching of what science has recently uncovered about how humans learn; the
arguments for and against privatization; where to draw the line against further
increases in class-size; the pros and cons of basing teacher pay and job
security on how their students answered some multiple choice questions; or the
use of computerized online course modules with technical assistants to replace
teachers.

Making all these issues more difficult is the fact, as
stated by Robert Freeman,[1]
that we still have not resolved the struggle between the two dominant education
models:

One model views schools as a
process of cultural birth, of bringing forth a new generation of children who
will carry on - replicate - the culture. The other model views schools as a
machine, an industrial process not unlike an assembly line. Its purpose is to
mass produce "factors of production" -- well trained obedient inputs
that can be used in the manufacture of wealth.

The government (at federal, state and district levels) is
exerting pressures on schools to accept the latter model -- the Industrial
Model view. One’s judgment, among these
two models, depends on how one views the future. For example, information that robots
are going to do most of the ‘work’ (even diagnostic tasks) in the future has to
affect how you feel about which education model is more appropriate. With the cost of College being so high, people
with moderate to low incomes have to consider whether the expense is worth it especially
when the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that most new jobs will not
require a college degree.[2]
One has to wonder; ‘what kind of jobs are they thinking about for the next
generation of HS graduates and what will the future job market look like?’

The view (of the future) that I see includes:

·Further consolidation of companies which produce
and distribute the goods (we feel to be essential for our lives) into internationally
centered production and distribution centers;[3]

·Growth of Human Resource (HR) management
companies that ‘mine’ and manage the stream of HS and College graduates (directing
them -- according to their grades and test scores -- to one or the conglomerates
they contract with); these HR companies will also link to and network Post
Secondary Schools with districts that feed them HS graduates and they will grow
based on their reputation for obtaining and interpreting student test score
data from state and district run databases (such as those being ‘rolled out’ by
the about forty some Race-to-the-top (RttT) grant states).

·Centralized multi-national banks with the
conversion of all currency into a unified credit system;

·Databases maintained by every state populated
with test scores, classes taken, grades, health records, DNA profiles, incarceration
and arrest records, and psychological and socioeconomic data for each student;

·More and more collusion between the private
sector and local school districts.

All this suggests how difficult
it is to guess what our president is thinking about by supporting all this
testing on one hand while admonishing teachers not to ‘teach to the test’ on
the other.

I have puzzled over this question
for months going through periods where I would rant at his image and swear that
I was not going to vote for him. But I
kept coming back to the feeling that he was a good person who must identify
with the terrible plight of young black and brown k-12 students, who obviously
(by virtue of his warnings of about not teaching to the test) knew that too
much testing and the use of test results to evaluate teachers, at the very
least, has and will continue to foster cheating, deterioration of student views
of the value of their education, to high levels of tension and a to a general
reduction in the likelihood of producing graduates capable of rational and logical
problem-solving thinking or the confidence to voice or logically test their own
intuitive solutions.

Then I began to think that maybe
he sees testing as a chance to level the playing field at least to the point
where it might be easier (for the more challenged kids) to move on to the next
level (relying on rote memory rather than the ability to reason, abstract and
interpret relationships into the future or to different settings) and let the
ones who want and can do better find their own way. I tried but I could not put the words
together and I kept falling into traps, and ending up questioning whether or
not I was showing signs of ‘racist’ beliefs.

Then I read Deborah Meier’s December 26, 2012 piece[4]
quoting material she had written 31-years ago:

“The task of returning testing to
its proper place will be difficult….Our belief in democracy–that normal every
day people can make sense of their world and learn to make decisions about it–
is at stake…There…is arising a renewed interest in educational tracking…and in
new legislative proposals to support private education… All these
anti-egalitarian trends….are nourished by the renewed focus on testing.”

This wonderful quote continues:

“To the ideologues of the New
Right, the focus on testing appears correct and proper, since the free play of
market forces ‘naturally’ produces inequality.”

I repeated to myself; “free play of market forces
‘naturally’ produces inequality.”

It sounded so ‘spot on’.
But then I asked myself, ‘would the ‘new right’ even have considered not
endorsing a methodology for measuring teacher performance based on the fact
that it might be detrimental to students’ mental growth?’ I don’t think
so. I think that most successful
business people attribute their success to in-born capabilities more than to
their teachers. Furthermore, people who
belong to organization like the BRT (Business Roundtable) must know that 25% of
our college graduates can’t find jobs and be afraid, that even our better
students will be getting beat out by those from other countries. So, this suggests that they would favor
reforms that they thought would make the upper half of the ‘bell-shaped’ curve
score even higher and forget those at the lower end. But this argument is also flawed because, in
reality, they probably had no clue as to how more testing was going to affect
the average student’s ability or apparent intelligence. Support for increased
testing simply grew among business leaders because they viewed schools as
production units in an industrial system; since they were putting so much money
into the system, they wanted proof that those hired to produce the product were
doing a good job.

But, what opinions might Obama have formed while he was
rising to power? Did he see an education system that had already been found
guilty, in the court of public opinion, of producing an internationally
inferior product and did he see the problem as the schools’ apparent inability
to get rid of ‘bad’ teachers? Surely, he
would have seen that most of those scoring at the bottom of the ‘Bell-shaped’
curve (and dropping out) were from inner city black and brown families and he
probably would have thought that anything that gave minority children a better
chance of graduating would be acceptable (for starters) even if it did risk a
little regression towards the mean in terms of, say, mental growth or the amount
of material learned (if one could measure either). But, I don’t think this is a good reason to
blame him; he is not the problem.

OK, at first, Obama probably sucked up the BRT-sponsored
rhetoric and the themes in movies like ‘Waiting for Superman’ and assumed that
the problem was caused by bad teachers and the unions that were protecting them
but he also had to have been thinking of the disastrous situations black teenagers
were finding themselves in, with approximately half of them either jobless
(dropped out or not) or in the military with some sort of a criminal record. He also had to see how unpopular NCLB
sanctions were with states. So, when he saw the problems NCLB were causing, he jumped
in with a discretionary funded program which gave states a chance to avoid NCLB
sanctions in exchange for them to agree to upgrade their standards and change
their tests to reflect those standards. One has to admit, this was a brilliant
strategy. Unfortunately, the program also includes the ‘value added’ method for
evaluating teacher, principal, and school performance. Anyway, he went for it
whole hog and I give him credit for doing that because it jolted a lot of
people up off of their chairs and deepened the radicalization of others.

The value-added methodology is full of invalid assumptions,
relies on data that are unreliable and force ‘teaching to the test’ as a
survival tactic for teachers. The problem is that our economy forces us to view
schools as production facilities. The
Industrial Revolution has entered a new phase which emphasizes the efficient
capture and deployment of human resources.
The expansion of student-test data may be seen as necessary for
performing cost-benefit analyses on decisions as to whether or not to retain a
teacher, but the measure they intend on using is riddled with invalid
assumptions and based on unreliable data.
Among a multitude of other problems is the fact that testing kills curiosity,
causes a lot of tension and does not build up children’s confidence in trying
out and defending an answer, traits that are among those most sought after by
companies in their new employees.

[1] Competing Models for
Public Education: Which Model is Best? by Robert Freeman

2 comments:

As someone who didn't even vote for Obama the first time, I bristle at the notion he's "a good person who must identify with the terrible plight of young black and brown k-12 students." If only this were true. This man raised by a white parent and grandparents and the product of private school education, has from the get-go formed strong corporate alliances. His first speech on education as a Senator set the tone for the firestorm he later sent down on public education, as did his speech before the 2008 AFT convention. I was in the audience--and one of the very few people there who did not join the throng in giving him a standing ovation. I remained seated and I voted third party.

I unfortunately voted for him the first time but did not do it this time. I find what Obama has done to public education nothing more than selling out to Wall St. But why would we find this inconsistent with any of his other policies? As the first African-American President he has failed the African- American community. People like Cornell West, Harry Belefonte, and Glen Ford find him a sellout. he just discusts me.